Ready to Play Beta about to start

By Frogboy on September 8, 2009 1:17:34 PM from

Last week at PAX I demonstrated a new free program coming from Stardock called Ready to Play.

During my demo I start with “I am sure I’m the only person who has ever encountered a mean person on the Internet…”

Of course, most people have run into people on-line who are obnoxious or griefers and such. Ready to Play is designed to alleviate that issue by letting people create gaming profiles of themselves.

Here’s how it works:

Users enter in data like how old they are, how competitive they are, what they value in gaming the most, and a bunch of other data. Then, it will take that data and generate a list of “recommended” friends, these are people who have similar gaming profiles.

For example, I, as a father of 3, 38 years old with a very scarce amount of free time have very different priorities when it comes to playing online than a 15 year old. Nothing wrong with 15 year old gamers at all. But if I want to get a quick game of say Demigod or L4D or Rise of Legends in, then my best case of getting a fun game going is to find people to play with who have similar gaming expectations in mind.

Once you’ve set up your profile you see a screen like this:

Read to Play also supports traditional “Friends” lists and indeed you can use your existing Impulse Friends with this seamlessly (Demigod’s built in Friends handling is going to be updated to make use of Ready to Play for v1.2). But in addition, you will also have the Recommended Friends too. Now, you can always block those people if you run into someone who you don’t like.

But when you’re ready to play, you pick the game you want to play from the list then pick who you want to broadcast to (by default, it’ll be everyone who has the game that is on your list).

Users who have Ready to Play running and are opted in to be broadcast to will get a small dialog in the bottom corner that looks like this. If they choose join they go here.

This pre-game chat window lets players set up what map they want to play, what password they want to use to get into the game, etc.

The results have been particularly spectacular internally when played with games whose persistent online communities have diminished over time.

Ready to Play supports any PC game. It will automatically pick up games on Impulse and soon from Games Explorer, Steam, and elsewhere.

If you want to sign up for the beta go to www.stardock.com/products/readytoplay

+897 Karma | 31 Replies

I am SO psyched for this. Keep up the good work!

Interesting...

Can you launch a game from in that lobby dialog thing, or is it just a chatbox? does it have voicechat support? Can you run it in the background whilst playing a game?

Seems interest enough

I'll download it

Looks nice! Thanks.

Spiffy. Sign me up. .... Err .... How do I sign up for the Beta? The link sends me to a Ready to Play frontpage where I can watch a movie and find out that the public download is in Fall of 2009.

-- Tukulis

Love to see that you mentioned Rise of Legends! Great (and grossly under-rated) game, I still play it from time to time. I really miss Big Huge Games.

Watched the video and it looks very promising! Kudos, you took all the (mixed) experience from the interaction with the Demigod community and turned it into a brilliant concept! This tool will be very useful for games with smaller communities I think.

Looks pretty good.

The two new Demigods look pretty good. The visual quality is absurdly good. The demon assassin is definitely something that I think will be very useful in a team based game. I’ll try to get some screenshots up shortly.

I'd love to see those screen shots...

I'm sorry, this is unclear. Is the Ready to Play BETA going to implemented in v1.2 of Demigod? Or will we need to wait until this major module is ready for release before we see Replays, Mods, and other features large and small which were promised to be released in small bits so we wouldn't have to wait until the entire enormous package was complete.

Is this in place of "Clan Wars?" Is this "Clan Wars" but better? What happened to those other matchmaking features which were promised?

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the promise of new stuff, and many of your ideas sound great! But, the announcement and discussion of all this cool stuff seems so haphazard, so incongruous, and so consistently inaccurate that I wonder what's the point.

Is it just to hype the fanbase? That works, until it works against you. For a company that claims to hold credibility, transparency, and substance in gaming in such high esteem, there seems to be an awful lot of hype and an awful little substance.

I would never question your dedication to the above values. I believe they are sincere. But when released dates are consistently missed by such wide margins, when planned features contradict themselves, and development prioirities show no rhyme or reason it makes me wonder what's going on? I go from "Stardock Rocks!" to "aww, how cute they're trying." and mostly I get extremely disappointed that I may never see a Stardock-published game that actually executes all ideals they so vocally proclaim.

The principles are great. I've yet to see them exectued in any sort of fully featured, fully functional manner. I understand that there's still a lot more to come. But the haphazard approach of your PR gives me little confidence that any of this stuff will be released in a timely fashion. And the haphazard PR combined with the track record makes me question the entire product line. I have even less confidence that it will be fully functional and fully featured when I finally do get my paws on it.

As I've said before, I understand that you are so vocal on these forums in the interest of transparency. I appreciate that. But the image that is overwhelmingly coming through that transparency is one of shoddy project management, questionable design decisions, and poor QA.

I thought it was pretty clear that v1.2 of Demigod will be able to interact with the Ready to Play system, implying that it currently does not work with RTP.

From my very limited understanding the Clan system, which initially was going to be done asap was delayed due to the Demigod community wanting other features first (ie. new Demi's, balance fixes etc.)

Also, it appears that there is some confusion in regards to the Developer versus Publisher relationship. I don't think Stardock has anything to really due with the coding of Demigod / Clan Wars and that Ready to Play has nothing to do with Gas Powered Games, with exception to recoding the friends list format to port to Ready to Play.

Personally i really like the transparency and that the CEO of a game publisher is responsive and communicative with the community of their games.

This looks very promising! Demigod needs a tight community to stay interesting so this is a step in the right direction.

Quoting mustang05tim,

reply 6

Love to see that you mentioned Rise of Legends! Great (and grossly under-rated) game, I still play it from time to time. I really miss Big Huge Games.

FUCKING LOVE THAT GAME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is genious, bonus to whoever had the idea!

For those looking to sign up for the beta:

Go to www.stardock.com/products/readytoplay and click the Download link. Sign up for the mailing list at that link, and you are good to go.

My source on this: Island Dog.

I have one concern: does the user data used to suggest players to play with also take into account the potential ping?

It'll be ineffective if all the like-minded players are too far away anyway (granted, there's nothing easy we can do to alleviate that at the moment).

I'd like to think your Profile details would include your location, and this would be taken into consideration. If this is missing, then I fear this will be yet one more thing I have to pass on.

What Impulse has been missing is some sort of killer feature that truly sets it apart from the competition (namely, Steam). With each revision Impulse has gotten better and better, but if someone asked me why use Impulse over Steam I would simply say because it has some exclusive games. Ready to Play coupled with the Phase 4 update will allow me to offer more substantial reasons to try out this excellent digital distribution platform.

Quoting jongalt26,

reply 10

I thought it was pretty clear that v1.2 of Demigod will be able to interact with the Ready to Play system, implying that it currently does not work with RTP.

That's my point. If 1.2 will work with RTP and RTP is only just about to enter beta then what does that mean for v1.2? Are we waiting for yet another major module to be finished before releasing this giant update that was supposed to be out in small chunks to begin with? What if RTP hits a snag like everything else Impulse related? Does that mean v.1.2 is indefinitely suspended until RTP is ready?

This kind of ambiguous discussion, mentioning the addition of one feature after another just because it sounds nice to promise features is what I'm talking about.

Quoting jongalt26,

reply 10

This is news to me, please point me to a post or something. Is Clan Wars still planned in addition to this? How are the two related? Whatever happened to CW except for those random posts Frogboy made promising the world by the end of Summer?

Quoting jongalt26,

reply 10

I believed Clan Wars was going to be more Impulse oriented. Maybe I'm mistaken there. Either way the talking head is giving confusing/contradictory messages. I thought Demigod was specifically designed so tha Stardock could continue developing the the Multiplayer interface through Impulse without having to involve GPG too much.

Quoting jongalt26,

reply 10

Personally i really like the transparency and that the CEO of a game publisher is responsive and communicative with the community of their games.

I agree, it was cool for a bit. But if nothing he says can be taken too seriously what's the point? He gave a nod to RoL. Sweet. But let's not forget how that game suffered the same issues this one is facing re: overhyped but relatively disfunctional online experience.

Has he said anything useful? Five months after release, how many of the major things he's promised have actually made it into the game? Of the one's that actually have, how many of them actually work completely and elegantly. Random Demigod's may be the closest thing to it, but you can't go random in Pantheon? WTF?

Post-release support was hyped through the roof, but 5 months later, what have we got with regards to major additions to the game? There's been a complete overhaul of the netcode because the first pass sucked and a couple tweaks here and there. But other than that, there's just a pending update with a pipedream feature list that keeps growing and growing while the release date fades into oblivion.

I'm not critisizing the post-release support. It's actually no worse than any other small company on a budget. But all the hype with so little to show for it is starting bug me a little. It just doesn't seem to be coming from the same reality...

I know this is getting a little off-topic. Ready to Play looks freakin' awesome. I can't wait. But given the history of such things Impulse-related, I'm concerned that it's not going to be out in a timely fashion and when it does come out it's not going to work very well. And the fact that this too has now been tied into v1.2 of Demigod has really thrown me through a loop.

Sorry... i know this is coming close to earning me a Ban or at least a Warning. Just know that I want to love you guys. I want to so SO much. I'm still waiting to see a demonstration of credibility and great software design to deserve it. I LOVE the ideas, but it makes me so sad to see great ideas realized into mediocre software. Just speaking my mind.

Nice, I like!

hmm interesting a bit like xfire but except it has the awesome suggested friends and other things nice cant wait for update

lol another useless program players dont need another bugged stuff they need fixes.

Wickedrusher, you've managed to post such unhelpful venom in three different threads in a matter of minutes. Your entitled to your opinion, however present it in a more constructive way or you won't be around much longer.

lets fix the bugs with more bugs then hopefully the bugs will eat each other, thats how we will fix it!!!

I wasn't aware Impulse had any game-destroying bugs?

Quoting ZehDon,

reply 24

I wasn't aware Impulse had any game-destroying bugs?

You aren't aware of the bug known as high download speeds? It ruins my Freecell experience, because my download finishes before I can complete a game. CURSES IMPULSE!

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Ready to Play Beta about to start